


Charybdis or the Siren

by cohobbitation



Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 17:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20049736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cohobbitation/pseuds/cohobbitation
Summary: Shon-ha-lok:the feeling when the current takes you. It's the Vulcan phrase for "love at first sight," but sometimes it sneaks up on you. Sometimes the oncoming tide has been twining around your heels for forty years and counting, and it only yanks you under when it knows you're good and doomed. Humanity will probably never know that the Vulcans associate them more with mermaids with every passing year - as changeable as the sea and twice as tempting - but the undertow has got Ambassador Soval and it's only a matter of time before he throws himself around a man he swore he'd never let get the better of him, like he's his only lifeline.A storm is coming, and it's going to take Soval under. But for now, he's treading water.





	Charybdis or the Siren

Archer took his hand again today.

He does it going and coming now, hard and swift and thoughtless, leaving Soval reeling in his wake. It's clear he has no idea what sort of mark he leaves, and he has no desire to learn. Soval shuts himself into his private suite at the end of the ever-too-short Terran day, going over the locks with double certainty before he allows himself to sag, trembling, to his pallet.

At these times he doubts himself. At these times he has no uncertainty at all. Was his desire to see the humans contained, penned in, managed, so transparently fueled by terror of what they would do given the power to control their own affairs? To stand, proud and unbowed, on equal stage with a thousand and a half years of Vulcan restraint — what, with their paltry century of running water? 

Did he fear their arrogance, or their skill?

Is it fear he feels now, as he sinks to the mattress, mind shot and meditation a lost cause? As he raises his hand to his mouth to see if he can still smell Archer's skin on his?

The man does reek. Oh, how he reeks. Soval presses his wrist into his face, trying to get a lingering whiff. Salt and musk and man and beast. If he takes the soft skin where his pulse throbs, all fast with wanting, into his mouth and tries to drink down whatever trace of _him_ remains, will that be too far for plausible denial? Soval squirms.

Henry Archer was not like this, he thinks petulantly. _Archer_ — Soval's mind ghosts around the mention of the word 'Jonathan' with religious avoidance — is too much like his mother.

Memories of the early days of his tenure are thin with confusion and overwork. He remembers Sally Archer because she made it impossible for him not to — too human and too much a woman-at-war not to sour the memories of her biddable, dutiful husband by association. Now, he regrets how short a rein he kept Henry Archer on, because he was the only variable on an incomprehensible planet that Soval had any hope of controlling. But then, it was all that he could do.

To the day she died, Sally Archer never let him live it down. He has known Jonathan Archer — _the_ Archer, the last one to remain and the only one to matter — would never let him live it down either. Until recently, it did not bother him.

Now he lays up nights, crossing and uncrossing his thighs, wondering when J— when _Archer_ grew up, and despite Soval's best efforts, became a captain and a man.

_And what a man he is._ Soval bites off the thought.

It is illogical to assume that either one man or the human species would stay children forever, just because it soothes Soval to have one less thing to worry about. Growth is inevitable. Power is inevitable.

_But must it be so strong?_ Soval thinks, drawing his hands over his shoulders to fight a chill he knows does not come from the cold sea air. _Must it be so fickle?_

Must it smell like salt and sex so?

This new... twist. in Archer's behavior is perilous. Soval had protocols for his illogic before. His spite and his aggressive bitterness made him, at least, a known entity. But the new steadiness he brought with him from the Expanse seems too good to be true. The more patient, the more still Archer becomes, the more skittish he makes Soval. And the heat in his eyes is unquantifiable.

And he keeps _touching_ him.

If Soval had known that shaking his hand that one time would mean shaking his hand every time after, he... he would probably have done it still. But he would have done it with more trepidation, with more conscious awareness that he was hurling himself into a breach he did not know how to get out of.

But he would have done it still.

_What have you done to me, Jonathan Archer?_ Soval buries his face in his hands, so he can smell him still. _What will you yet do?_

He knows the answer to that. In the morning, when morning comes too soon, Archer will throw him on the rocks again, with some unparsable metaphor about red skies (as if skies should be any other color) and riptides and the many beguiling figures in this planet's myths about the spirits who live in the seas and consume the unwary. Siren and Scylla. Is that how it goes?

_They will lure you astray. They will lure you away from the straight path. Plug your ears and don't listen, for if you hear them speak, you will forget yourself._

Jonathan was always so impossible not to pay attention to.

**Author's Note:**

> (╯°Д°)╯︵/(.□ . \\) _WRITING EXERCISES!_ One day farting out quick little mental images won't be agony. That day will not be this day, though.
> 
> **Edit: ** son of a bitch, I have to change the title because I have blatant favoritism issues when it comes to nifty bits of quotable folklore **


End file.
